Top all-time · #3630
Chris Said
Personal blog · chris-said.ioscienceeconomicsdata
Chris Said's personal blog at chris-said.io covers science, economics and data. Since 2016, 21 different Hacker News readers have linked it 37 times, most often “Optimizing Things in the USSR (2016)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-06-03, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (11) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN commenters cite Chris Said's posts on why central planning is computationally hard, Soviet economics, solar-storm grid risk and air quality indices as background references.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 11 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Chris Said
Most-linked posts?
- Optimizing Things in the USSR (2016)6 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2020-11-13
- The case for criminalizing scientific misconduct4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2024-06-17
- Optimizing sample sizes in A/B testing2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-01-16
- How to make polished Jupyter presentations with optional code visibility2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-02-15
- Optimizing things in the USSR (2016)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-05-11
- Solar storm risk and EMP attacks2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-06-20
What Hacker News says?
Sorry, here's the correct link https://chris-said.io/2024/06/17/the-case-for-criminalizing-...
Comment linking /2024/06/17/the-case-for-criminalizing-scientific-misconduct/
on “Fraud, so much fraud”Submitted Optimizing things in the USSR (2016) as a story · 153 points
HN discussionI recommend the book from Spufford (2010): Red Plenty on this topic. - https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2010/aug/08/red-plenty-fra... - https://chris-said.io/2016/05/11/optimizing-things-in-the-us...
Comment linking /2016/05/11/optimizing-things-in-the-ussr/
on “Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)”Submitted Solar storm risk and EMP attacks as a story · 144 points
HN discussionThere is an open debate about the likely damage done by power surges along long-distance power lines. Industry funded research claims that they should survive both EMP and major solar storms. Real world experience suggests that they are overconfident. See https://chris-said.io/2020/06/18/everything-ive-learned-abou... Regardless of which side you believe, it is clear that any "worst case scenario" should include the…
Comment linking /2020/06/18/everything-ive-learned-about-solar-storm-risk-and-emp-attacks/
on “Chernobyl power plant captured by Russian forces”Submitted Optimizing Things in the USSR (2016) as a story · 134 points
HN discussion> Turned out not to work, probably b/c you can't stablize an inherently unstable complex system. Or because they didn't have enough computing power at the time https://chris-said.io/2016/05/11/optimizing-things-in-the-us... .
Comment linking /2016/05/11/optimizing-things-in-the-ussr/
on “Business Booms and Depressions Since 1775 (1943)”Submitted Four pitfalls of hill climbing as a story · 131 points
HN discussionThis is historical revisionism. The soviet leaders tried to copy the success story of Deng Xiaoping's transitions from socialism to capitalism in China. The planned economy system just didn't work. The "US Empire" can't explain why by the late 1980s, the Soviet Union had 4x tractors as the United States which was totally wasteful. Here is a good article on why it's computationally challenging to completely plan an e…
Comment linking /2016/05/11/optimizing-things-in-the-ussr/
on “Mitsubishi Heavy to build biggest zero-carbon steel plant”Submitted Empirical Bayes for multiple sample sizes as a story · 104 points
HN discussionI can recommend the book Red Plenty, if you want to learn more about the successes and failures of Soviet economy: https://chris-said.io/2016/05/11/optimizing-things-in-the-us...
Comment linking /2016/05/11/optimizing-things-in-the-ussr/
on “Soviet Shoe Factory Principle”Submitted The case for criminalizing scientific misconduct as a story · 50 points
HN discussionI have recalled related post[1] and relevant NH discussion[2] from 2020. Also just ran across another recent related article [3] and its Reddit discussion [4]. [1] https://chris-said.io/2020/06/18/everything-ive-learned-abou... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23580362 [3] https://www.sciencenews.org/article/sun-solar-storms-earth-h... [4] https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/lt7tnd/solar_storms_...
Comment linking /2020/06/18/everything-ive-learned-about-solar-storm-risk-and-emp-attacks
on “How prepared are we for the next giant solar flare?”Submitted Optimizing sample sizes in A/B testing as a story · 33 points
HN discussionAt least computationally, central planning is quite hard https://chris-said.io/2016/05/11/optimizing-things-in-the-us...
Comment linking /2016/05/11/optimizing-things-in-the-ussr/
on “Xi Jinping’s Capitalist Smackdown Sparks a $1T Reckoning”Submitted Optimizing things in the USSR as a story · 11 points
HN discussionTo extend, interesting read on the subject of the soviet economy: https://chris-said.io/2016/05/11/optimizing-things-in-the-us... HN discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14515225 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25084479
Comment linking /2016/05/11/optimizing-things-in-the-ussr/
on “LK-99: The Live Online Race for a Room-Temperature Superconductor”Submitted The case for criminalizing scientific misconduct as a story · 6 points
HN discussionParent comment refers Double Descent in Human Learning [1, 2] which references the Deep Double Descent phenomenon in Large models [3]. The gist of double descent is the phenomenon where a _large_ model appears to over-fit as we expected from traditional ML, but then the val loss starts decreasing. The general consensus is that the model switches from memorization mode to interpolation mode which enables generalizati…
Comment linking /2023/04/21/double-descent-in-human-learning
on “Grokking in Julia”Submitted The case for criminalizing scientific misconduct as a story · 5 points
HN discussionOf interest to folks looking at this post -- Chris Said has a deeper dive on US air quality metrics and their provenance, https://chris-said.io/2023/06/19/the-air-quality-index-doesn... . The attempt to make things easy to interpret using a nice relative scale ends up in the end make them very opaque to interpret the number itself in any meaningful way.
Comment linking /2023/06/19/the-air-quality-index-doesnt-make-any-sense/
on “Air Quality Reporting on iOS”Submitted Why inaccurate antigen tests are better than slow PCR tests as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted Four pitfalls of hill climbing as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted Religions as firms as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Keyboard shortcuts I couldn't live without as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Learning by flip-flopping as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Optimizing Things in the USSR (2016) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted How to make polished Jupyter presentations with optional code visibility as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Optimizing Things in the USSR as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Shower Problem (2020) as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
